Proof That Meditation Can Change The World

This article from hinduism.about.com discusses how meditation can actually CHANGE the world! This is very exciting news for those of us who still believe peace is a reachable goal in our society! Read more about the wonderful effects of group meditation below:

On three different occasions during 1983-1995, groups of approximately 7,000 meditators were formed for periods lasting from 8 to 11 days, twice in the United States and once in Holland. The effects were studied using terrorism data collected completely independently by the Rand Corporation, the renowned California think tank. Five days after the assemblies started, terrorist activities in the world calmed down, the study reports. The study also found that warfare due to national and international conflicts decreased by approximately 30%. Assessment of the effects on warfare came from reports appearing in the New York Times and London Times.

“Our formula predicts that the square root of 1% of the world population meditating together would be needed to create a worldwide effect. That number was approximately 7,000 at the time of the study,” said study author Dr.

David Orme-Johnson of Maharishi University of Management. “We found that the effect could not be explained by any trends or cycles in the data, or by the time of year or other factors. Nothing else was happening that could have explained the sudden drop in armed conflicts throughout the world at that time,” said the study’s coauthor Dr. Michael Dillbeck, also of Maharishi University of Management.

Group Meditation Produces Coherence
So how does it work? According to the researchers, the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programs take the mind to its innermost state of silence, which is the unified field of natural law, the source of order in the universe. When enough people in society experience this level of awareness, then the coherence of the unified field is spread throughout the world, softening ancient ethnic, political, and economic stresses that are at the basis of war. “Fifty studies have shown that the influence of Transcendental Meditation on the larger society is to replace crime, hostility and fighting with mutual respect and cooperation,” said Dr. Orme-Johnson.

Experts Emphasize Importance of This Approach
Another proponent of trying this approach is Dr. David Edwards, Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. “Although I myself have not been directly involved in this research, from my perspective of almost 40 years of study of foreign policy, arms control, and theories of social change, I can say that this is extremely significant research. I have participated in urging members of Congress and other government leaders to try it. The cost of implementing a permanent coherence creating group in the world is less than a single B2 bomber.”

“Peace Palaces” Being Established
So far, the U.S. government has not added this approach to its arsenal of defense strategies, so Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who pioneered this approach to peace, is organizing a permanent group of 40,000 in India and 3,000 Peace Palaces throughout the world. Peace Palaces are places where these techniques are taught and practiced to generate coherence in their local region. A Peace Palace was inaugurated on April 10 in the Catskills of New York.

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Another article from social-consciousness.com reported the same results:

Meditation has the potential to literally transform the world. In 1978, what is known as the “Maharishi Effect” took place when a group of 7000 individuals over the course of 3 weeks were meditating in hopes of positively affecting the surrounding city.

They were able to literally transform the collective energy of the city which reduced global crime rates, violence, and casualties during the times of their meditation by an average of 16%. Suicide rates and automobile accidents also were reduced with all variables accounted for. In fact, there was a 72% reduction in terrorist activity during the times at which this group was meditation.

Almost 50 studies have been done further confirming the benefits of global meditation and it’s direct impact on everything in the world, even so far as to have the results published in the Journal of Crime and Justice in 1981. We know meditation has endless health and psychological benefits, but it is now being explored by politics and sociology because of its undeniable energetic impact.

For example, a day-by-day study of a two-month assembly in Israel during August and September of 1983, showed that, on days when the number of participants at a peace-creating assembly was high, the intensity of an ongoing war in neighboring Lebanon decreased sharply. When the number of participants was high, war deaths in Lebanon dropped by 76%.

When the study was repeated in Wales, they got amazing results, as well. In 1987, Merseyside had the third highest crime rate of the eleven largest Metropolitan Areas in England and Wales; by 1992, it had the lowest crime rate. 40% below levels predicted by the previous behaviour of the series. There were 255,000 less crimes in Merseyside from 1988 to 1992 than would have been expected had Merseyside continued to follow the national crime trend.

The secret of the Global Maharishi Effect is the phenomenon known to Physics as the ‘Field Effect’, the effect of coherence and positivity produced from the field of infinite correlation—the self-referral field of least excitation of consciousness—the field of Transcendental Consciousness, which is basic to creation and permeates all life everywhere.

Meditation takes your consciousness to the implicate levels of existence where your intentions have consequential effects on the explicate level that we interact with before it even manifests. Consciousness gives rise to the material. The key idea is that all of existence emanates out of a field of universal consciousness, called the Unified Field or Super String Field.

“I think the claim can be plausibly made that the potential impact of this research exceeds that of any other ongoing social or psychological research program. It has survived a broader array of statistical tests than most research in the field of conflict resolution. This work and the theory that informs it deserve the most serious consideration by academics and policy makers alike.” — David Edwards Ph.D., Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin. Read more at: http://www.social-consciousness.com/2014/01/scientific-proof-that-group-meditation-can-change-the-world.html